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‘Ridiculous’: Pentagon doesn’t even know what to do with extra $500 billion Trump wants to spend
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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politics
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Hmm let's give an extra $500 billion to an agency that has failed all of its financial audits...
Which, some how the Dodge waste fraud and abuse team, never seemed to get around to investigating... They claimed they would, but I guess were too busy gutting everything that was investigating musks companies before getting bored with it.
Don’t forget the canceling of any services that weren’t exclusively for white men.
What most people don't understand is there can be $0 missing money at the same time...
It's not one big pile of money, every agency has their own pile and much smaller piles.
So say Navy sent 10k to Norfolk and Norfolk used it. That balances to $0 logically.
If that 10k is late being sent between accounts, that's a $20k discrepancy because it hits both ways instead of cancelling out, which isn't logical but that how finances work. Missing 10k debit and 10k credit is still missing 20k even tho it balances out.
But, and I can't stress this enough, saying the DoD is "an agency" just tells everyone who knows about this stuff, that you have no idea what you're talking about. Some agencies fail their annuals, some have never failed a single one.
If you have questions, ask them. But please don't just repeat talking points you don't understand.
That is not how accounting works.
No...
That's literally how accounting journals work...
Quick edit:
Like, this is day 1 accounting stuff, it doesn't matter if it's a positive or negative.
-20 and +20 add up to a 40 error.
Just like +20 and +20 does, or -20 and -20 does.
They all add up to the same amount of "missing" money.
What an incredibly detailed and accurate way to dismiss the fact that, despite you clearly defining what accounting errors are, the Pentagon still can't audit itself successfully and therefore shouldn't be given more money.
You...
You think clarification is dismissal?
I'm fine answering questions to help people understand this, but you don't understand any of it and aren't asking questions...
You have an opinion on what the conclusion should be, so you want to debate facts to make your conclusion appear to be the only option.
But all of that would be pointless because you're choosing to remain willfully ignorant of how accounting ledgers actually work.
I just don't have the time for that.
You think that them failing audits is my opinion? I think you missed the point and wrote an accurate yet completely unnecessary post.
TLDR: you made a highly accurate "welllll actually" post that did nothing to counter the OPs statement.
Since about the 1500s we use double booking in bookkeeping, meaning the accounts look like that so that the balance sheet can balance and show 0 missing money. In most audits you don't "summarise" error accounts, you check the balance accounts, statements and you check for why there's stuff lying in the transaction accounts.
You should probably have stayed on a couple more days of your accounting class.
No. It's literally not.
Did you sleep through class? Maybe have a dream where the professor told you to make up missing money?
This type of discrepancy is, wait for it, accounted for. It's the point of bookkeeping. You know that money has been sent or received, you know how much you owe and how much you're owed. A check in the mail isn't going to cause a failed audit. 10,000 checks in the mail won't cause a failed audit. You can look back over thousands of transactions and know, "oh, we normally get that check on the last Friday, it's the last Monday, nothing to worry about yet." Any auditor would also look at the history of payments and not account for money that's not expected yet.
Stop going on the Internet and telling lies.
Why would we ask you questions? Do you work the GAO or something? Like what is this BS? DoD has a major accountability problem. Some of it is financial. Most of it is in their indiscriminate killing of civilians.